Oconaluftee Indian Village and Museum of the Cherokee
Indian Cherokee, North Carolina
At the Oconaluftee Indian Village in Cherokee, North Carolina, visitors experience “full immersion into crafts, culture, history,” said Laura Blythe, Cherokee Historical Association program director.
A guide leads groups through the 1760s-era Cherokee encampment, where they can watch crafters engaging in beadwork, finger weaving, basket-making, wood carving, copper hammering and weaponry, such as making arrowheads and blowguns.
In the living-history area, re-enactors wearing traditional dress demonstrate daily life, and guests can explore several types of traditional housing, such as a log home and an osi, a type of hot house.
Inside the village’s seven-sided council house, seating is divided into sections for the clanship, and ceremonial dances are performed daily at the Square Grounds, the village’s ceremonial dance grounds. During the summer, the village also runs the Time of War series, a re-enactment of a battle scene between Cherokee warriors and their opposition.
About a quarter-mile away, the Museum of the Cherokee Indian offers guided tours and in-depth experiences.
“A lot of times people associate museums for things that are dead and gone, but the Cherokee culture is a living, breathing, alive culture, and we want people to experience that when they come,” said museum executive director Bo Taylor.
Guides known as Cherokee Friends wear traditional dress and engage and educate visitors. For a separate fee, the museum also offers Cherokee Experience, a program that allows groups to customize a wide variety of experiences, such as classes on pottery, basketry, weaving, primitive skills, blowguns and archery. Other options include storytelling, dance performances and a Cherokee language course.
Groups can end their day at the recently updated 2,100-seat Mountainside Theatre watching “Unto These Hills,” an outdoor drama that tells the story of Cherokee history from 1780 to the present.
Cherokee Nation Cultural Tourism
Tahlequah, Oklahoma
With more than 350,000 citizens, the Cherokee Nation is the largest tribal nation in the United States; most of the nation’s population lives in Oklahoma.
The Cherokee History Tour is one of the most popular ways to experience the Cherokee Nation. The tour takes people to the Cherokee Heritage Center, where guests will find Diligwa (dee-lee-gwah), a living replica of a 1710 village that opened in 2013. The village re-creates Cherokee life at the time, and people dressed in authentic attire demonstrate blowguns, basket weaving, pottery-making, flint knapping and games of stickball. Guests can also tour Cherokee dwellings; council houses, where clan representatives governed; and, in the summer, gardens planted with what the Cherokees would have grown 300 years ago.
Hands-on art classes teach groups the historic and practical details of Cherokee carving, flint knapping, finger weaving, moccasin-making, and flat or round reed basket weaving. Groups can also arrange for interactive theatrical storytelling assemblies and cultural presentations.
In the center, the Trail of Tears exhibit recounts how the U.S. government in 1838 forced the Cherokees to relocate from their ancestral lands to present-day Oklahoma, a death march during which thousands of Cherokees died. The life-size exhibit portrays people walking the Trail of Tears.
The tour includes stops at several historic sites, including the 1844 Cherokee National Supreme Court Museum and the Cherokee National Prison Museum, which served as a penitentiary from 1875 to 1901. The striking Seminary Hall in Tahlequah was built in 1889 as the Cherokee Female Seminary, known for being the first higher-education school for women west of the Mississippi, and is still a showpiece on the Northeastern State University campus.
